Jessica Valenti on Writing Sex Object and Holding Nothing Back

When I spoke to the Brooklyn-based writer Jessica Valenti by phone yesterday, she had the palpably apprehensive air of someone not quite able to enjoy the calm before the storm. Next week, Valenti, founder of the website Feministing.com and a columnist for The Guardian, will publish Sex Object. It’s her sixth book, but her first straight-up memoir. (Past projects, like Full Frontal Feminism and Why Have Kids, were, she says, driven by a specific campaign or message.)

As memoirs go, _Sex Objec_t is pretty intimate. “When I started showing it to a few friends and got their reaction, I was like, ‘Uh-oh,’” Valenti tells me. “They were pretty shocked.” The author, well acquainted with the harassment and trolling that feminist Internet writers endlessly endure, is already steeling herself for the full brunt of the backlash.

“Ha-ha, you think you’re a sex object, and you’re hideous and horrible,” she says, recapping the kind of tweets that have already started to roll in. That, of course, is hardly the point. “This book is called Sex Object not because I relish the idea of identifying as such,” Valenti writes in her introduction. “I have girded myself for the inevitable response about my being too unattractive to warrant this label, but those who will say so don’t realize that being called a thing, rather than a person, is not a compliment. That we might not think of it that way is part of the problem.”

Sex Object’s essays take their author from puberty to the present, through her years growing up in ’90s New York, when confronting a naked penis on the subway was practically a daily event and male teachers hit on female high school students with alarming abandon. We follow her through a series of toxic relationships and a couple decent ones, a period of cocaine abuse, and two abortions. Ultimately she gives us a window into her marriage, her turbulent pregnancy, the dangerously premature birth of her daughter, and her struggles with postpartum depression.

As Valenti tries on different identities in her circuitous journey to self-acceptance, the only constant is the persistent, underlying, undermining, humanity-denying hum of misogyny. “Who would I be if I didn’t live in a world that hated women?” the author wonders at the outset. Sex Object doesn’t try to answer that question. Valenti’s memoir is less a road map than an accumulation of experiences, a radically honest experiment in self-exploration that’s perhaps most radical in its refusal to draw any neat conclusions.

Appropriately, the book ends with an unannotated selection of some of the hateful feedback the Internet has offered over the course of Valenti’s career. “Get back in the kitchen and make me dinner, bitch,” demands one email from 2008. “Tiny-brained women, why did we ever let them think they are someone?”

“It was important to me to include them without comment,” Valenti says of these endnotes. “I didn’t want to answer them. I didn’t want to contextualize them. I wanted them to stand on their own.”

You’ve written a number of books. Was this the most difficult one? In terms of actual writing, this came a lot easier. It is certainly more difficult waiting for it to release. The other books [each] had a goal: Full Frontal Feminism I hoped would make younger women call themselves feminists when that really wasn’t yet in style. The Purity Myth was about shining a light on virginity culture and the way it harms women. This one is so much more personal. But it was actually really cathartic.

Did you start with the title? It came later. I got halfway done with the book and realized that I was writing a book. When I looked at these essays I was working on, that theme of dissociative dehumanization kept coming up. The title just came to me. As soon as I thought of it, I put it out of my head, like: I could never call it that.

I was imagining the backlash, the tweets (which I’ve already started to get). “Ha-ha, you think you’re a sex object and you’re hideous and horrible.” Of course, the irony is not recognizing that calling yourself a thing is not a compliment. Once I got further into it I realized that I’ve never let trolls or the potential for harassment stop me from saying what I wanted.

You write about plenty of people who have made you feel like a sex object. But you also write about people who treated you pretty well. Why? It just felt like part of the story of who I was in this context of objectification, and sexuality, and finding your sense of self. A big part of finding my sense of self was relationships, the good and the bad. I think there was something really interesting about looking back at the moments when I was being treated like a full human being and I rejected it. Why that might be.

Did you struggle with any impulse to hold back? I pretty much felt I was going to put everything out there. Holding back would be a disservice to the book. That said, I come from a privileged place in that I have the ability to do that. I’m not going to ruin my career. I don’t think everyone has the same opportunity to write in this way without consequence. Not that there won’t be some consequences to writing this. I’ll be getting emails any day now. But I do have a certain freedom that I wanted to take advantage of.

Are there people you shudder to imagine reading the book?Sure. Not crazy about the idea of my parents reading the sex bits, but I think that’s pretty normal. When I think about the people who have been harassing me, of course it’s scary to think about them having such personal insight into my life. But I’ve been dealing with backlash for more than 10 years, so there’s a part of me that’s like: Let’s just put it all out there and they can get it all out of their system.

Plus they’ll have to buy your book to harass you. Right! That’s what I’m hoping!

You are, at this point, a public figure. Do you think this book will change the way the public sees you? I hope it does. Part of the reason I wrote the book is, as you said, being a public-facing feminist, I hear a lot from younger women. They say things to me like, “I want your career. You handle the harassment so well.” Inside I’m, like, really? It doesn’t feel that way to me at all.

It felt like I was doing them a disservice by projecting this image of feminist fortitude that I don’t necessarily think matches up with who I actually am.

You write that there was a time in feminism where “taking up any space was considered feminist blasphemy.” The collective was always more important than the individual. Obviously the feminist movement has changed. Do you think it’s changed enough that a book like this is no longer boundary pushing? I’d like to think I’m still pushing boundaries. That said, I do think the current feminist moment lends itself in a way that it just wouldn’t have 10 years ago. Women are sharing their stories a lot more. I’m not just talking about the content of those stories, but the act of storytelling itself as a feminist act. And that’s really exciting to me.

One episode that really struck me: a guy has sex with you when you’re passed out. You write that, though you know it was assault, you never thought about it that way, nor were you particularly damaged by it. Why was it important to admit that? I think people have this image of public feminists as always having the correct answer or ideology. And that is just not what the messy truth of people’s lives look like. It felt important to include in the same way it felt important to include the moment where my mom tells me about her abortion, and my first reaction is: I can’t believe it because she’s such a good mom.

I know about abortion stigma. I know that good moms get abortions, too. But somehow that was the first thought that popped into my head. Being a feminist, thinking about these issues a lot, doesn’t make you immune to cultural messages. I thought that was important to talk about.

You also write about your experiences with a tough pregnancy, a very premature baby. Is there a through-line from sex to motherhood? Did you find both experiences, on some level, objectifying? I think my sense of identity was totally turned upside down by motherhood. How much of that was motherhood itself, and how much was the severe circumstances of how I became a mother, I don’t know. I think the combination of becoming a mother and having this really intense postpartum/PTSD depression—it does make you feel dehumanized [going] through extreme medical interventions. That experience made me feel very disassociated from my body.

One of the big reasons I wanted to include those early years of motherhood is having really severe depression and PTSD, feeling that disassociation in a much more acute, psychological sense, made me aware that that had always been with me. It made it easier for me to examine and try to move past. It came to the surface.

Do you imagine your daughter reading this?Definitely. I don’t know what she’ll think of it. I hope that she’ll like it and be proud. I thought a lot about what she would think. I hope that it helps her to see me as fully human and not just her mom. I think so often we do not recognize our mothers as full people. If she decides to becomes a mom one day, I think that will be helpful.

You end the book with a selection of messages that horrible Internet trolls have sent you over the years. Do you think people will be surprised to see the extent of the harassment? I think some people will be shocked. I think a lot of people understand in theory that women get harassed, but they don’t get just how bad it can be. They should know.